happen to Naomi and Minnie because bad things happened to everyone. Zach wasn’t able to protect them from viruses and runaway trucks. But out in the wider world were a lot of evil men and insane dictators, and being a marine was a way to help protect his homeland, his home, his sisters, and their way of life.
Semper Fi.
He hoped he wasn’t turning into a girl, because he wanted to be their brother, not their sister. As he paged through recent drawings of Laura Leigh, he wondered about his gender because, although she was seriously pretty and though he had drawn her from observation and from memory more often than Michelangelo had drawn God, Jesus, saints, and angels combined, he felt no stirrings of desire for her.
Well, all right, now and then there were stirrings and a couple times the stirrings were so embarrassing that, to distract himself, he chewed on ice cubes until his teeth ached.
But maybe ninety-five percent of his obsession with Laura Leigh had nothing to do with sex. Mostly he felt about her the way he felt about his sisters, but even more so. She seemed so fragile, delicate, slender, so small and vulnerable that Zach worried about her, which struck him as weird because, although petite, she wasn’t a dwarf with brittle-bone disease, she was a normal size for a thirteen-year-old girl. He wanted to protect her, wanted her always to be happy, wanted everyone to see in her what he saw in her, not just beauty but also merit, virtue, kindness, and a precious something he couldn’t even name. His feelings for Laura Leigh were so tender and affectionate that they didn’t seem to be the kind of masculine things that a boy should be feeling. Sometimes the sight of her left him breathless, and sometimes when he was drawing her from memory, his throat grew so tight that he couldn’t swallow, and when at last he did swallow, though it was just spit, he sounded as if he were a pig taking down an entire apple. Surely only girls – and boys turning into girls – were swept away by their emotions like this.
He turned the tablet to a clean page, propped it on the slanted drawing board atop his desk, and took his pencils from a drawer. He intended to draw only Laura Leigh Highsmith’s nose. Her nose was a constant challenge to him because of its perfection.
After Zach sharpened his pencils and arranged them, before he began to commit carbon to paper, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move. He swiveled in his chair and sat watching the door to his closet swing slowly open.
Although the door had never done this before, no expectation of danger passed through Zach’s mind. He possessed a good imagination, but it didn’t lead him into bogeyman territory, either of the zombie-vampire-werewolf kind or of the guy-in-a-hockey-mask-with-a-chainsaw kind.
In real life, people who wanted to kill you were one of two varieties, the first being your freaking nutcase true believers who wanted to fly a plane through your window or get their hands on a nuclear weapon to blast you into bone dust. There was nothing you could do about them. They were like earthquakes or tornadoes to an ordinary citizen, so you had to leave them to the marines and not worry about them.
Then you had your everyday criminals who were motivated by envy or greed, or lust, or a desperate need for drugs. They looked so much like law-abiding citizens that more often than not they jammed the muzzle of a gun inside one of your nostrils and demanded your wallet or your booty before you realized they weren’t the kind who ever said “Have a nice day.”
Neither an al-Qaeda operative nor a convenience-store-robbing junkie could have found his way into Zach’s bedroom closet.
When the door drifted to a halt, all the way open, he got up and went to investigate the cause of its movement.
His walk-in closet was deeper than wide, with clothes hanging and shelved along the two longest walls. The overhead light glowed, though he felt certain that he had switched it off earlier.
Toward the back of the closet, a pull-ring on a rope dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling, access to the crawlspace between the second and third floors. If you pulled the trap open, a wooden ladder unfolded from the back of it.
With the ladder down, a draft sometimes blew out of the space above and into the closet, strong enough to move the door if the latch hadn’t been engaged. But now the tightly fitted trap was closed, shutting off the only possible source of a draft.
They didn’t live in earthquake country, but like nearly every place on the planet, this city stood above at least one inactive fault. Although a minor temblor might be unlikely, it couldn’t be ruled out; however, he hadn’t felt the ground move.
Maybe the house had been settling. Houses did that. Maybe it slowly settled in such a way that the closet door no longer hung plumb. Then its own weight might pull it open if it wasn’t latched.
No other explanation presented itself. Case closed.
He switched off the light and stepped out of the closet.
Attached to the back of the door was a full-length mirror. Zach solemnly saluted himself, thinking of the day when on very special occasions he would wear dress blues and carry an officer’s Mameluke sword in a scabbard at his side.
As he closed the door, leaving the mirror to reflect only the dark closet, he listened to the latch click solidly in place. He was then overcome by a vague sense that something about his reflection, as he saluted, had not been right.
Maybe his salute or his at-attention posture had been sloppy. He had practiced them a lot when he was eleven, less when he was twelve, and lately not at all because when you were still years away from being a real marine, practicing such things too much seemed childish.
He returned to his chair at the desk, in front of the blank page of art paper, and picked up his pencil. He called forth the memory of Laura Leigh Highsmith’s singular and exquisite nose, and contemplated it with the hope of a sudden insight that would precisely define why it was so exquisite.
As far as he knew, there were no hairs in her goddess nose. He had never glimpsed any bristling from it, nor had he ever seen a ray of light catch a hair shape in the shadowy ovals encompassed by her porcelain-smooth nares. Of course he never walked right up to her and peered up her nostrils, so he couldn’t be sure they were in fact hairless.
“Idiot,” he said.
She was human, so of course she had hairs in her nose. She would die or something if she didn’t have hairs in her nose. Her nose might be as hairy inside as a freaking gorilla’s armpit. Hair or the lack of it had nothing to do with why her nose was a work of art beyond his talent to depict.
Hoping for inspiration, he set to work with his stupid pencil and the stupid blank sheet of paper. As slowly he drew, he thought of Laura Leigh, of course, but he also thought from time to time of the somehow-wrong reflection, and even though the latch had firmly engaged, he half expected the closet door to swing open again.
Naomi had a walk-in closet like Zach’s but somewhat bigger, and on the back of the door hung a full-length mirror, a really splendid beveled-edge looking glass of such sparkling clarity that she half believed, when the stars were aligned properly, that the mirror might become a doorway between her world and a magical realm into which she could step and pursue fabulous adventures and her true destiny.
This world where she had lived for eleven years was magical, too, in so many ways, if a person was perspicacious enough to notice the numerous wonders of it. Perspicacious was her new favorite word. It meant “having keen insight,” an almost uncanny ability to see through – and to comprehend – what is dark and obscure. Unfortunately, there was a terrible shortage of perspicacity these days but veritable oceans of dark and obscure.
Anyway, this world was magical, but just not magical enough for Naomi’s taste. She yearned for wizards, flying horses, talking dogs, rainbows at midnight, and for things she could not even imagine, things that would leave her speechless and her heart swollen, not swollen in a bad way, like with disease or something, but swollen with awe and delight. If she ever had a chance